Inuit astronomy

Transcription

DOUG HERMAN: Aloha everyone and welcome back to “Stellar Connections”. Our next speaker is John MacDonald. Now retired, John MacDonald spent most of his working life in the Canadian Arctic. He for 25 years coordinated the Igloolik Research Center, located in the Inuit community of Igloolik in Nunavut’s north Baffin Island region and I can’t believe I got that out of my mouth without blowing it. Throughout his time in Igloolik he collaborated closely with local Inuit elders to record and document the oral history and traditional knowledge of the region. Part of this work included a major study of Inuit astronomy and cosmology leading to the publication of his wonderful book The Arctic Sky: Inuit Astronomy, Star Lore, and Legend. Long interested in contact history between Europeans and the Inuit, John is currently editing and annotating an unpublished journal documenting early encounters between the Inuit of the Igloolik area and members of an 1820s British naval expedition seeking a Northwest passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. John’s presentation is entitled after his book “The Arctic Sky: Inuit Astronomy, Star Lore, and Legend”. Please welcome John MacDonald. [applause] JOHN MACDONALD: Thank you Doug. Boy these lights are bright. It’s like the midnight sun. Again, and also thank you for plugging the book. It’s available on Amazon by the way. But I should point out that the proceeds go to two things; the - - Museum and also to support an oral history project in the community in which I lived all these years. I’m also grateful to be invited here. It’s many years since I’ve been to Washington, and the last time I was simply passing through. I’m going to be here for approximately a week, so because I was brought here so to speak by the Smithsonian I’m going to hang on and go through the museums as much as I can, so thanks very much. It’s probably very clear to us all now that cultural astronomies are about particular people in particular places. So first a few words about Inuit and their Arctic homelands. Inuit, and I name this and I use the name to include the Upic in the Western part of the Arctic. Inuit live mainly in the Arctic regions of North America, Greenland, and even have a toll hold in parts of Alaska. Excuse me, a toll hold in parts of Northeastern Siberia. The blue areas on the map indicate approximately their traditional homelands. They’re predominately coastal dwellers, although a few groups live within the margins of the treeline, notably in parts of Alaska, Northern Quebec, and Labrador. Coastal Inuit traditionally lived on marine mammals such as seals, walrus, and whales; while those living inland relied almost exclusively on caribou. Diet was augmented seasonally by fish, migratory birds such as geese, ducks, and also ptarmigan, and minimally by foraged roots and berries in the summer. Over the past 60 years or so, Inuit have become more urbanized and moving from their camps in the land into crowded settlements established by national governments across the Arctic. This afternoon we’ll be looking mainly at the astronomy of the Inuit of Igloolik. They’re also known by their own name as the Igloolingmut who live on a small island in Canada’s Nunavut territory. Igloolingmut star knowledge is shared by other Inuit communities in North Baffin Island, but at a general level its cosmological foundations are applicable across the entire Inuit range from the Bering Sea, across Arctic America, to the West and East Coasts of Greenland. Igloolik and the Igloolik Island is shown inset on the map in the screen is just below 17° North, placing it 320 kilometers above the Arctic Circle. The winters here are long and dark and the sun is gone each year from the end of November until the middle of January. And the summers while they’re short and blessed with the midnight sun, are invariably short. The ice-free season even in these times of climate change lasts around three months from late July until the end of October. In fact, Igloolik as I speak is experiencing freeze-up, not like here. Igloolik was established as a settlement by the Canadian government in the early 1960s and is now a growing town of around 1,900 people, mostly Inuit. Before moving into the settlement Inuit of the area lived in small seasonal camps on the coastal inlets of nearby Baffin Island. Locations chosen for the predictability of the marine animals on which they depended. As you can see, the terrain around Igloolik tends to be rather flat and featureless compared to most other locations in the Eastern Arctic. There are no mountains to obscure the horizon, and so a large and rather inviting sky is the hallmark of Igloolik scenery, which is very good for anyone that’s interested in stars. Igloolike Island has an extremely rich archeological heritage. The numerous remains of ancient dwellings scattered throughout the island have found their way into Inuit cosmology. Inuit tradition views these sites as having been occupied at a single time in the very distant past by the island’s first people. This was at a time when there was no winter and no death. Life it was said was easy and food plentiful, but the island eventually became impossibly overcrowded, the countless archaeological sites prove this, and people were literally being pushed into the sea. Legends tell that this desperate situation was eased only by people calling for death and winter. So death and winter came, social order was established, and the growth of the community checked. A version of this legend ends with the words “with death came the sun, the moon, and the stars. For when people die, they go up to the heavens and become luminous”. Archaeologists with a very different cosmology view the island sites as having been occupied by various Arctic hunting peoples over the last 4,500 years as the island gradually rebounded from the seas following the last Ice Age. My interest in Inuit astronomy came about perhaps inevitably as a result of a long-term resident in Igloolike. I was there with my family for almost 25 years. And it was also aided and abetted by my dabbling in the very esoteric practice of celestial navigation. During my observation sessions on clear winter nights, and I’d be usually fumbling with a frozen sextant or a frozen artificial horizon, older, curious Inuit would often happen by point out a few of their stars, gently implying or so I thought that an understanding of the sky and the employment of its contents could be had without the use of my cumbersome gadgets. I took the hint and so began in 1985 a series of interviews with Inuit elders about their astronomy lasting intermittently over some 20 years. All this was part of a major oral history project sponsored by the Igloolik elder society. About 30 elders, three of the main contributors shown here, [foreign language] participated in the program. When interviewed about their astronomy, most insisted that the information they possessed was meager compared to that of their parents or grandparents. Nevertheless it was clear that these elders were virtually the last keepers of a more or less detailed knowledge of their astronomical traditions. The rapid dilution of Inuit star knowledge is not surprising. The semi-urban life most Inuit now live hinders the transmission of traditional knowledge. Conditions readily conducive to learning about the celestial sphere have ceased to exist. In the old days for example, slow-paced, dog team journeys across the open tundra gave excellent opportunity to learn about the sky. Nowadays however with their snowmobile travel leaves very, very little inclination or enthusiasm for star gazing. Significantly elders pointed out that they no longer noticed the stars because of the glare of the community street lights. Unfortunately light pollution, the anthema of urban dwelling sky watchers everywhere now pervades the Canadian Arctic. Inuit cosmology was based on shamanistic belief and observance and offered a view of the sky and its contents well suited to their spiritual and pragmatic needs. Their astronomy, particularly for those groups living above the Arctic Circle reflects the unique appearance of the celestial sphere at higher latitudes, perhaps demonstrated most dramatically by the sun’s absence from the sky during the mid-winter months. The illustration on the screen is by [foreign language], a well-known artist from Cape Dorset on Baffin Island. [Foreign language] image beautifully captures the Inuit perspective of the intimate relationship between the sky, its contents, and the earth. Unlike our view, which seems increasingly to expand the limits of space, [foreign language] sky is actually contained by the earth. You’ll notice too that her drawing is also about time, place, and activity. In effect it’s a calendar delineating the Arctic year, including the freezing and melting of sea ice, as well as the key activities associated with each of the seasons. Notice too that the sun’s annual cycle is represented along the fringe of high mountains bordering the earth. And you can see the sun’s annual cycle is represented around the edge of the drawing. Across the Arctic, the notion of a flat earth was widely held. In Alaska for instance, lost hunters were said to have fallen off the edge of the world, while in Labrador such accidents were prevented by high cliffs, keeping anything from living going to the region beyond. The carving by [foreign language] on the left of the screen nicely illustrates the world’s mountainous perimeter. The image on the right shows the legendary mesana [phonetic], at the end of the world staring triumphantly into space holding a string of brilliant beads, proof that he has reached the earth’s extremities; a widespread Inuit legend, known from areas as far apart as Alaska and Northern Quebec, tells us that such beads are found only at the world’s end. Earth and sky are analogous in the Inuit view, each in winter having a similar snow-clad topography. In the sky, the sun and moon live in adjoining igloos, regular traffic took place between the two realms. Shima’s for instance, on their spirit flights would visit the moon and the moon man protector of abused orphans, would come to the earth to enforce taboos and to confer fertility on childless women. It was believed that taboo breaking was often responsible for the creation of celestial objects and virtually all stars with human personifications were created following the commission of some grave social transgression. Murder and incest as we shall see are at the root of the epic Inuit legend recounting the creation of the sun and the moon. Because of Igloolik’s high northern latitude, around 70° north, the visible portion of the celestial sphere is notably less from what we see in the more temperate latitudes. In practical terms for example, this means that the brightest star, Sirius, such an obvious feature of the late night sky in Washington just now is barely seen at Igloolik. It literally creeps along the horizon. In contrast, the twin stars Castor and Pollux, which rise and set at Washington’s latitude, are circumpolar, meaning that they’re always above the horizon and can be seen any time during the hours of darkness in Igloolik, obviously if there’s no cloud cover. Inuit names for stars and star groupings fall into several categories. As I’m going through this you can look at the names as they give various constellations on the table there. The two principle ones are first human and animal personifications. The second intrinsic designations derived from some feature of the star in question, including for instance, its spatial relationship to other stars, whether the star is leading or trailing, and in the case of the North Star, it’s apparently fixed position in the sky. Some have anatomical designation; the breastbone of which is what they call the Ploidies, and also the collar bones. Normally only single stars are used by Inuit for personification of humans and animals. This practice is consistent with the widespread that such stars were once animate beings on earth, possessed of single souls, which in transformation logically retain their individual identities. The image on the screen shows a view of the sky as perceived by Igloolik Inuit. Almost all their major stars and constellations are represented here, including most obviously Ursa Major. I mentioned the collar bones, these are four stars that comprise our stars Capella and Colleen and Castor and Pollux; Cassiopeia has actually two designations. The three brightest stars in Cassiopeia are considered lamp stands for a soap stone lamp. I’ve mentioned the Ploidies before, that’s the breastbone. We’ll hear more about Alderbarn, which is the polar bear and the surrounding stars, the star cluster, the Hiodies. Sirius here is represented as an old woman cleaning her igloo window. She also has a lamp, which apparently flickers each time people go between the moon and earth. Now if any of you have seen the star Sirius at lower latitudes it’s extremely brilliant. Some people have likened it to a cut diamond. It is full of prismatic figures changing all the time, and Inuit feel that the draft of these passerby’s cause the lamp to flicker thus. Myths and legends can serve a variety of purposes from the Archean and quoting of cultural values and expectations to explicit cautionary tales aimed at dissuading wayward behavior. Celestial legends share these same characteristics, but in addition, are a practical device for making sense of the sky and its contents. Indeed Igloolik elders say that one of the purposes of star stories is to help us remember the exact location of important stars used in time telling and in navigation or way finding. And incidentally once Inuit do tell you their stories about stars, they do tend to stick with you. They’re less complex than some of the projections that we tend to make on the sky. And the legend of Uluctut [phonetic] stars, and these are the stars in Orion; Uluctut means the runners and it illustrates the point I’ve just made very well. The story involves the three main stars in Orion’s belt and the prominent star Aldebaren in the constellation Taurus and finally a number of stars in the Hiodies cluster. This legend relates that on a bright moonlit night three brothers and their dogs come across a polar bear; they begin to hunt it. However they’re unaware that they have been seen by a woman who has recently given birth and is thus under various taboo restrictions, one of which prohibits her from looking at hunters. Breaking this taboo causes the three hunters, their dogs, and the polar bear to rise up to the sky where they’re all conformed into stars. The three hunters become Orion’s belt stars, ahead of them is the polar bear, the star we know as Aldebaran, surrounded by the Hiodies star cluster, which are now the hunter’s dogs. There’s a lovely embellishment of this story and that’s the great nebula in Orion is sometimes said to be the children and they’re usually cousins of the hunters that are carrying fur clothing to their fathers that are pursuing the polar bear. Now, those of you that have observed the great nebula in Orion will recognize that it’s quite fuzzy and stands in very well for fur clothing. Legends can also be seen as akin to hypothesis, offering an explanation for the way things are or seem to be. The sun/moon legend provides an example. In its entirety, this legend is one of the most widespread and complex of all Inuit traditions. It is often abbreviated to relate how two siblings, a brother—a sister and her incestuous brother rise up to the sky to become the sun and the moon. In its fullest sense this story is much more than this. It addresses universal concerns about creation, social and cosmic order, nourishment, retribution and renewal. The concluding part of the narrative in which the sun and the moon are actually created goes like this; long ago before the sun, moon, and stars, when all was dark, a young woman alone in her igloo was repeatedly visited by a man who took advantage of her. Wishing to find out who this man was, she decided that the next time he visited she would mark his face with soot from her extinguished lamp. On his next visit she did just this, smudging his face with her sooty fingers. When he left she followed him to a large igloo where people were celebrating. And there in the light of the oil lamps she discovered to her horror that her visitor that had been none other than her own brother. Distraught, she lit a torch of moss and rushed around the igloo. Her brother also lit a torch and followed her. Outside they ran round and round the igloo in a clockwise direction. The sister leading, the brother following, until at last they ascended into the sky. Her torch grew brighter and brighter, but her brother’s torch merely smoldered. She in her brilliance became the sun, and he the pale moon. Across the Arctic, key elements of this legend have been used by Inuit to explain a number of observed phenomenon. For instance, their apparent motion of the sun across the sky from east to west is established in the clockwise direction of the chase around the igloo. The sister’s brightly burning torch compared to that of her brother’s smoldering one accounts for the difference in luminosity between the sun and the moon. The moon’s dark patches are the smudge marks on the brother’s face, and this illustration shows them as does this, the dark patches on the moon are soot. Solar eclipses results when the moon in his continuing pursuit of the sun periodically catches up with his sister and embraces her again. Even the moon phases are explained; the sister full of disgust at her brother’s incest stops giving him food. He gradually wastes away, her pity evoked, she begins to feed her brother again, thereby restoring him to his former size. This cycle of revolution and pity continues endlessly, hence the monthly waxing and waning of the moons. Inuit have no word for time, not at least in the abstract sense, commonly understood in our industrial society. This does not mean of course that they somehow lacked any comprehension of the links between time and so- called economic activity, a view too often attributed to cultures with perceptions of time do not coincide with those of the Western world. Expressions dear to us like saving time, losing time, over time, time is money, create all kinds of difficulties for Inuit translators. Once at a conference that was dealing with Inuit co-ops, a government advisor was trying to explain to Inuit that time costs money. The translator was really baffled and gave it his best shot, which was a watch costs a lot. And if I go on much longer I’ll be timed out by Doug here. I’ll mention that with the introduction of Christianity, Inuit were introduced to that rather unusual concept or division of time called a week. And on the right of the screen we have an early calendar that was made by Inuit hunter. Again, you can see the preoccupation that Inuit have with the product of the hunt. This is basically a tally of animals he’s caught up to a certain date. The markings around the edge of the calendar are days of the week, obviously the crosses are Sundays. The ones that are sort of scored off are days that have already passed, but that gives you some idea of the introduction of our time, the beginning of Inuit accepting industrial time as it were. For Inuit, the changing seasons determine not only their day-to-day activities, but also their diet, dwelling locations, and family groupings as they moved about their local area in response to the migrations of the animals on which they depended. The annual cycle was reckoned usually by 13 moon months, beginning with the first new moon coinciding with the sun’s return. The designation of each moon was based on recurring events in the natural world, such as the birth of seal pups, the nesting of birds, the thickening of caribou pelts, and the freezing of the sea ice. Significantly moon months and the depth of winter were marked by the appearance of certain stars, and in a moment we’ll look at some of these particular months. You can see here how the names of the moon months pick up things that are going on in the environment. This one was important; caribou hair sheds, it was a moon when it was good to go caribou hunting to catch caribou for winter clothing. The one down here, [foreign language] meaning hearing, perhaps its meaning isn’t immediately obvious, but this happened round about early November when the ice was thick enough to allow dog team travel and remote camps could then visit each other by dog team because in these days of course there were no communications like we have today. The moon of [foreign language] literally meaning great darkness, spanned the sunless period straddling the winter solstice. This was a period of relative inactivity and resources at this time were often scarce. But to the extent permitted by available moonlight or twilight, Inuit would still try to hunt on the sea ice, but it was often unproductive. Storytelling and indoor games help pass the time. String figures or cats cradles as they’re sometimes known were especially popular and were played almost obsessively. I’ll just mention that elders would tell me that various camps had different kinds of string figures and people would be sent on long journeys actually to get someone’s new invention of a string figure. It was only during the sunless period that these games were permitted because it was widely believed that string figures would entangle the sun as soon as she appeared on the horizon. The appearance of two stars, which we call Alter and Tatazed [phonetic], but which the Inuit call [foreign language] in the Northeastern quadrant of the sky around mid-December was taken as a sign of winter solstice as well as a promise of the sun’s return. The next one is [foreign language]; this literally means that the sun is possible. And obviously it was a month of the returning sun, and for Inuit marked the beginning of a new year. Until the introduction of Christianity to the Igloolik area in the 1920s and ‘30s, the sun’s annual return was an occasion for celebration of renewal, symbolized by the extinguishing and then relighting of the soapstone lamps with a new flame. This ceremony was also said to strengthen the land. The ceremony usually involved children extinguishing the lamps and I think the involvement of children themselves, a symbol of renewal, was used particularly for that purpose. The lamps among the igloos of each community would be relit from a single flame, a new flame from tinder that was kept especially for that purpose. And you can imagine that temperatures, let’s say 40 Celsius below or 30 as it could easily be then, caused—didn’t really invite people to extinguish their only source of heat, but the sun’s return was so significant to them that these observances were made without any complaint. In recent years this celebration has been reestablished and is now a major community event. This image on the screen shows a soapstone lamp used in the ceremony just after it has been relit. Note the parallel imagery between the lamp flame and the inset picture of the sun peaking just above the horizon. When the sun comes back it’s literally on the horizon for a few minutes before disappearing again. Traditionally the return of the sun was an anxious time for Inuit due to the effects of atmospheric refraction, the sun often appeared reluctant to return, sometimes hesitating and behaving erratically on the horizon. And on a number of occasions in Igloolik when I’ve witnessed the return of the sun, the day it would always be back earlier than the prescribed date astronomically because of this phenomena that we know as refraction. But you would see just the tip of it some days and then remarkably the next day you wouldn’t see it again; there would be a glow, but no sun. And then the next day it would be above. And this bouncing around the horizon was very typical of the sun’s return, and I think it really led to Inuit uncertainty about the sun’s actual return, which was never taken for granted and taboos at this time were carefully observed; one of which was to destroy the cords of the string figures and as I’ve already mentioned there was fear that these string figures, even symbolically would prevent the sun from rising. With the sun now back on the horizon, string games were replaced by a game called [foreign language]; and this is a cup and ball game where the player tried to impale a caribou vertebrae usually on a bone spike and the action of tossing up the vertebrae was said to encourage the sun to rise. In fact some songs that go with the game of [foreign language] include references to the sun rising higher and higher. The next month, and this is the last month that involves the actual sun’s return, was called [foreign language] and that literally means that the sun is increasingly rising. Its elevation was carefully observed, and I think this all goes back to the uncertainty that the Inuit had about the sun really coming back. So in Igloolik at least they would actually measure the sun and its return by in successive days seeing if the sun would first fit between the extended thumb, mid-thumb or harpoon thumb first, harpoon first, then the thumb of a mitt, and then finally with the mitt appearing to fit between the sun’s lower limb and the horizon at noon. When it had reached this point it was called [foreign language] and [foreign language] literally means mitted, the sun has been mitted. This stage was called [foreign language] and occurred a few weeks before spring equinox. And it really marked the end of the winter’s dark period, Inuit were now confident that the sun was back, light levels were rising increasingly, and the seals and walrus in which they depended were beginning to become more accessible. The worst of the winter was behind them, and although temperatures remained low, the warmer days of spring were in the offing. And around this time which was a time of promise, they would note the two stars that they called [foreign language], but which are known to us as - - appearing on the horizon, fairly above the Southern horizon just after sunset when the sky was still bright to the west. And there’s a song still well-known in the Igloolik area which celebrates the sighting of the [foreign language] stars. And in translation the last verse goes [foreign language] appear, yonder the daylight. It is a joyous feeling that again in the broad daylight will I sleep. Thank you. [applause] MR. HERMAN: Thank you John.